My wife got rid of a bunch of her magazines and gave me the magazine boxes she had been keeping them in. I filled those boxes with my magazines and went and got more. They are much easier to handle than the bankers boxes I’ve been using for overflow. So I’ve begun excavating the scary place known as the PatCave.

Also they’re just the right size to stack up and make a fort. Just sayin’.

So: A little while ago, Randall Munroe posted an xkcd cartoon called “Up Goer Five“, which is a diagram of the Apollo/Saturn V stack, annotated using only the thousand most common words in current English.

Inspired by that, Theo Sanderson wrote an online text editor which warns you when you are using a word that is not in the thousand most common list.

Inspired by that, I have begun to revise my resume. I work with Oracle databases. Or simplified:

I make computers do things, like keep big tables of who has to pay money to the place I work. The tables are kept on computers that only keep tables. I make those computers work as fast as they can so the other computers that read the tables can do their work quickly. Once a day I make my computers do new things or fix things that are broken. Other people send me new or fixed things for the computers to do. I put the new things on the computer in the right order so it all works.

So here’s the first shot: A single scan from a single angle. Almost no cleanup: pulled into Lightwave and minimal color added.This particular scan is actually full of holes, most of which are covered by the use of a black background.

Next steps will be to get multiple angles, stitch them together and further cleanup.

A scan takes a couple of seconds on my computer. For multiple angles, I’ll probably add a timer and a means to either move the Kinect around me or a spinning seat. I was scanned years ago on a Hollywood laser scanner that was on display at the Tech Museum in San Jose. (It’s not there anymore, alas). That scanner moved around me as I sat still, that’s probably the best approach, if more Stuff to build.

I think we’re gonna join the rest of Merrica and spend a few hours eating pizza in front of the telly and watching two teams of armored folks battle over yards of territory. Then the prologue to Lord of the Rings will be over, and we’ll be back in the Shire for a while – the pre-restoration Shire, mind you – none of this new-fangled olde-time touristy construction [footnote 1].

By which I mean The Fellowship of the Ring. If a team I remotely cared about were in the Super Bowl, or if they were playing, say, outdoors in a blizzard the way Merrican football is meant to be played, then I might look in for a couple minutes on that other spectacle, whose very name I shall not utter here, as it is a Registered Trademark and I am not an Official Licensee.

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In other news, Mr Imahara of the Mythbusters reports that having four medical staples in his forehead [footnote 2] will not set off metal detectors. To which I reply, “Indeed, but which metal detector will it not set off?”

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Ye Footnotes:

[spoilers, dear]

Footnote 1: The Hobbit of course takes place partially in one of Nuevo Zeeland’s prime tourist attractions – a beautiful sheep farm outside Matamata. Lord o’ the Rings also shot its Hobbiton scenes there, but then struck the sets. People took tours of the beautiful sheep-farm anyway: indeed I would have done so myself four years ago, had things gone a bit differently.
So anyway:
When Mr Jackson and crew went back to rebuild the sets for the Hobbit, this time they built them permanently and will not strike the sets. Which means, I suppose, that tickets for the Hobbiton tour will cost more in the future.

Footnote 2: It seems that Buster the crash-test dummy smacked Grant upside the head earlier this week. So where the heck was Tory Bellici slacking off to? Is it not his function to take one for the team? And have the Mythbusters inadvertently caused the Robot Uprising we’ve all feared these several years now?